Assassination– Overall feels pretty good, energy regeneration in level 100 premade gear (ilvl 660) seemed about right especially with lemon zest proving an addition 0.6 energy per second. There are two problems with the spec, vendetta and complexity. Vendetta remains a really boring button to press with absolutely zero rotational interaction. Especially compared to the cooldowns of the other two specs vendetta feels very lacking. I completely forgot about the vendetta crit perk till I was writing this just now as I didn’t notice it during testing. The spec also feels like its missing a mechanic. The new emphasis on envenom is good but it isn’t enough to make the spec challenging and interesting. The combination of the new pandemic mechanic plus the rate that spec plays at means that you’d be hard pressed to generate combo points fast enough to clip envenom.

Combat– Combat feels very slow, not just compared to current live speed but compared to the other two specs. While combat does have faster energy regeneration than the other two specs the much higher energy cost per combo point makes the spec feel very slow. The energy cost of sinister strike probably should be returned to 40 energy and then rebalance adrenaline rush so the spec doesn’t feel too spammy. I’m also somewhat worried about the UI requirements of the new bandit’s guile system, I’m a huge fan of the design but this mechanic is going to require addons to play correctly. You can track the progress in your head reasonably well but it requires a fair amount of concentration, especially if you are also trying to mentally track bandit’s guile progress (As a reminder this really needs better UI support).

Subtlety– Subtlety hasn’t changed much from live where it’s a lot of fun and so it still plays very well on beta. The pace seems good and find weakness optimization is still a fun mechanic, albeit a frustrating one with the default UI. The problem is that is really all the spec has going for it right now, the resource generation is high enough (even without full HAT saturation) to keep SnD and rupture up trivially without having to refresh during dance which was one of the major sources of complexity in the spec. If the design intent is for subtlety is for the spec to be intentionally more difficulty it certainly isn’t living up to that now. The durations of SnD and rupture need to be reduced substantially, at least 20% to 30% to make subtlety rogues have resource constraints that need to be actively managed.

Note: Crimson Tempest is currently proccing Relentless Strikes per target which probably isn’t intended, I’ve tried to consider the impact of that additional energy to evaluate these rotations without this behavior. I’ll also note that even if this isn’t intended it does make the current rotations better.

Assassination– Lemon Zest speeds up the rotation very nicely when you have multiple targets to cleave. I’d like to see the default UI provide a bit more information about Lemon Zest, specifically how long your shortest deadly poison has left but that may be enough of specialized piece of information for addons to handle. For sustained AoE rupture multidotting and weaving in crimson tempests is a lot of fun, on three targets it feels like you have infinite energy and crimson tempest as AoE poison damage increase synergizes nicely. Even discounting the possible CT, RS bug (weaving envenoms rather than CT) the energy regen feels quite high. I don’t know if this is the intended or optimal damage AoE rotation for assassination but it is a great rotation so I hope it is.

Combat– The combat single target rotation is slow and AoE is even slower. The blade flurry energy penalty makes the spec feel even worse. Blade flurry provides passive maintenance for lemon zest which helps counter the blade flurry energy penalty but still slows the rotation substantially. For sustained AoE CT basically effectively replaces eviscerate with a time to die breakeven point depending on the number of targets. CT does not however feel like an exciting button to press, at least not without the possibly unintended RS interaction. The same issues that plague the single target rotation plague combat here, the rotation feels incredibly slow and when compared to the way the other two specs speed up on AoE it feels even worse.

Subtlety– Combo points per target on FoK feels exactly as overpowered as we all expected but given subtlety’s current AoE weaknesses on live I’m not sure that is a huge problem. The combo point overflow exacerbates the lack of resource limitations and multiple target lemon zest maintenance is a bit more frustrating for subtlety compared to the other two specs but it isn’t a deal breaker. On sustained AoE CT as a rolling dot can result in some pretty beefy dots on a lot of targets but doesn’t provide a lot of AoE burst which seems like a good tradeoff. The one complaint I have with sub AoE is the general lack of interaction between its major single target mechanic, shadow dance, and AoE, it makes the two rotations feel somewhat disconnected.

To recap:Assassination Single Target: Good pace and flow, vendetta is boring and spec doesn’t have enough skill rewarding mechanics.Combat Single Target: Way too slow, BG needs better UI support and may still be too hard to manage without addons.Subtlety Single Target: Good pace, dance is still a good mechanic, not enough resource limitations to challenge players.Assassination AoE: Good pace and flow, rotation is really fun. Awesome design, please don’t change.Combat AoE: SLOWWW, not particularly interesting but basically function.Subtlety AoE: Good pace, very high combo point generation is fun, may need more interaction with single target.

5 thoughts on “Beta Rogue Rotation Feedback”

There were a few surprising things
1) How good assassination energy regen felt on single target. That has been a consistent complaint during MoP and that it feels good in what I believe is T17 normal gear equivalent was pleasantly surprising.
2) On the flip side just how bad combat felt, I knew it would be slow but that it felt this slow, especially given that assassination felt pretty good.
3) The assassination AoE rotation was very surprising, on live rupture multidotting feels a bit clunky due to cp movement, that combined with decent pace on single target and seal fate now proccing from FoK makes the AoE rotation flow way better than expected.

I agree on SS/AR change, I’d rather SS be 40e and AR reduce the energy regeneration (and buff damage in other ways). I also would rather BF instead of penalizing energy regeneration, have it penalize physical damage instead, that way if BF is turned on but there are no additional targets to hit, you still do reduced damage (discouraging making it passive), but the pace of the spec is not slowed once you turn it on.

Shadow Dance could really use a different hotbar from Stealth. I’m never likely to open a fight with Rupture or Eviscerate, hence they are not on my Stealth-hotbar. But during Shadow Dance I will want to use Eviscerate and possibly Rupture. It’s a bit bloated at the moment. Also dislike that Subtlety ends up having so many mandatory glyphs. This leaves me with less choice.

It’s probably worth noting that at the beginning of every expansion – for me at least – combat always feels painfully slow. Then as gear is obtained it picks up until you have energy coming out of your ears. It seems to be the general theme of natural combat progress.